Tamara Denning

Exploring the potential of mobile phones for active learning in the classroom

Research has shown that educational technology can broaden and enhance the use of active learning in large classrooms. An educational technology platform often relies on students to bring laptops or specialized wireless devices like clickers to interact through the system. Mobile phones are an attractive alternative, as most students already possess them, they have more capabilities than dedicated clickers, and yet are small enough to minimize interference with note taking on a classroom desk.This paper presents the design and use of a mobile phone extension to Ubiquitous Presenter, which allows students to submit solutions to active learning exercises in the form of text or photo messages. In an exploratory study, students found that text messaging worked well for exercises with multiple choice or short answers. Entering symbols common to computer science was difficult. Many problems were more suitable to photo messaging of a handwritten answer, although image quality must be managed. The phones small size left space for the use of a notebook. The students had concerns about the message charges that would accrue in use. In conclusion, we offer recommendations to instructors and system designers interested in leveraging mobile phones to increase communication in the classroom.

BALANCE: towards a usable pervasive wellness application with accurate activity inference

Technology offers the potential to objectively monitor peoples eating and activity behaviors and encourage healthier lifestyles. BALANCE is a mobile phone-based system for long term wellness management. The BALANCE system automatically detects the users caloric expenditure via sensor data from a Mobile Sensing Platform unit worn on the hip. Users manually enter information on foods eaten via an interface on an N95 mobile phone. Initial validation experiments measuring oxygen consumption during treadmill walking and jogging show that the systems estimate of caloric output is within 87% of the actual value. Future work will refine and continue to evaluate the systems efficacy and develop more robust data input and activity inference methods.

Computer security and the modern home

A framework for evaluating security risks associated with technologies used at home.

Multimodal communication in the classroom: what does it mean for us?

Experimentation has shown that in-class educational technologies, by permitting anonymous, authored participation, can dramatically alter student communications in the classroom. Now, the appearance of dual pen-and-keyboard computing devices in the university classroom, notably Tablet PCs, motivates thinking critically about how different expressive modalities could improve in-class student problem -solving and communication.This paper describes the use of Ubiquitous Presenter 2.0 in a study to discover the driving issues of multimodality for both in-class technologies and student exercises. This paper sensitizes instructors to the issues of modality and makes specific recommendations for application design. We find that the choice of modality is not merely one of efficiency or naturalness, but is loaded with numerous personal, social, and material considerations. Although use of the pen (over typed text) is generally preferred, we find that choice itself is critical to encouraging student creativity, collaboration, and communication.

Augmented reality: hard problems of law and policy

Augmented reality (AR) technologies are poised to enter the commercial mainstream. Using an interdisciplinary research team, we describe our vision of AR and explore the unique and difficult problems AR presents for law and policy---including around privacy, free speech, discrimination, and safety.

Security through play

The US Naval Postgraduate School and University of Washington each independently developed informal security-themed tabletop games. [d0x3d!] is a board game in which players collaborate as white-hat hackers, tasked to retrieve a set of valuable digital assets held by an adversarial network. Control-Alt-Hack is a card game in which three to six players act as white-hat hackers at a security consulting company. These games employ modest pedagogical objectives to expose broad audiences to computer security topics.

CPS: beyond usability: applying value sensitive design based methods to investigate domain characteristics for security for implantable cardiac devices

Wireless implantable medical devices (IMDs) are cyber-physical systems that deliver life-saving treatments to cardiac patients with dangerous heart conditions. Current access control models for these systems are insufficient; more security is necessary. In response to this problem, the technical security community has investigated new directions for improving security on these resource-constrained devices. Defenses, however, must not only be technically secure; in order to be deployable, defenses must be designed to work within the needs and constraints of their relevant application spaces. Designing for an application space---particularly a specialized one---requires a deep understanding of the stakeholders, their values, and the contexts of technology usage. Grounding our work in value sensitive design (VSD), we collaborated as an interdisciplinary team to conduct three workshops with medical providers for the purpose of gathering their values and perspectives. The structure of our workshop builds on known workshop structures within the human-computer interaction (HCI) community, and the number of participants in our workshops (N=24) is compatible with current practices for inductive, exploratory studies. We present results on: what the participants find important with respect to providing care and performing their jobs; their reactions to potential security system concepts; and their views on what security system properties should be sought or avoided due to side effects within the context of their work practice. We synthesize these results, use the results to articulate design considerations for future technical security systems, and suggest directions for further research. Our research not only provides a contribution to security research for an important class of cyber-physical systems (IMDs); it also provides an example of leveraging techniques from other communities to better explore the landscape of security designs for technologies.

Evaluating Cybersecurity Education Interventions: Three Case Studies

The authors collaborate with cybersecurity faculty members from different universities to apply a five-step approach in designing an evaluation for education interventions. The goals of this exercise were to show how to design an evaluation for a real intervention from beginning to end, to highlight the common intervention goals and propose suitable evaluation instruments, and to discuss the expected investment of time and effort in preparing and performing the education evaluations.

Keeping Ahead of Our Adversaries

Building a secure system requires proactive, rigorous analysis of the threats to which it might be exposed, followed by systematic transformation of those threats into security-related requirements. These requirements can then be tracked throughout the development life cycle. The Web extra at https://youtu.be/77FTWWj1clk is an audio podcast of author Jane Cleland-Huang reading her column.